What a comic book movie can teach about our brotherhood

I have been thinking a lot lately about brotherhood. For a few weeks, I have wanted to talk about various events I have seen or heard about. However, I did not have the proper package to wrap it up in. Until I saw Captain America: Civil War.

If you have not seen the movie yet, don’t worry I will not spoil it for you. The general plot is about how a set of events is put into motion that drives a divide between Captain American and Iron Man. This divide causes members of the Avengers superhero team to pick sides. Eventually, both parties end up fighting, as in a civil war.

Near to the end of the movie the architect of the events that bring about this civil war explains the motivation. When trying to destroy something attacking it is a hard fight and victory is unlikely. Getting a group of people to start infighting makes for an easy fight with an inevitable triumph.

What does this have to do with brotherhood? I have been noticing many in public safety we are attacking each other more and more.

Rescue Humor (this blog) has multiple social media outlets. More than once I have posted pro-police items, which have received rather harsh anti-police comments. True I expect anti-police comments, face it people hate cops. What I don’t expect is the profile photo of the person posting the comments to have a fire or EMS symbol on them. Clicking on their profile shows the person to list their profession as being a Fire or EMS employee.

Likewise, I was recently invited into a “secret” Facebook group. This group with over 15,000 members is repugnant. The group is made up of career firefighters, and their purpose is to make fun of volunteer firefighters and female firefighters. Scrolling through the posts in this group is embarrassing. Grown men claiming to be “professionals” posting photos of women calling these women “slam pigs.” The posts about and terms they call volunteers is way too long for me to list here.

Finally, I see a blog run by police officers who bash fellow officers. Keep in mind I am not talking about a blogger calling out an officer for an ethics violation. This guy claims to work in a bigger city and posts critiques of dash camera videos from police encounters. A recurring theme for him is to compare smaller village police to mall cops. He also will rip apart tactics, stating how rural cops would be killed within five minutes of going on patrol in the hood.

They way I see it we don’t need CopBlock, BLM, angry citizens pissed about a firetruck at the grocery store, people who tell us they pay out salary, business owners mad about an ambulance sitting post in their parking lot, nor any of the other stuff making public safety look bad. We do it to ourselves. We do it to each other. We also do it here online, where anti-public safty people can see it, thus giving them more stuff to use aginst us.

If we actually want to claim to be a brotherhood with a common goal of public safety, maybe it is the time we all act like it. Critiques for educational and improvement purposes are one thing. These mean spirited attacks we lob at each other are only going to destroy us from the inside.